


Naked on the ice

by Lilly_White



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Depression, Dreams, F/M, Grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6738634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilly_White/pseuds/Lilly_White
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cloud dreams. Aeris talks. And Tifa says a lot of f-words, because she’s tired of this shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Naked on the ice

**Author's Note:**

> Title is taken from the 'Another Earth' OST.

Sometimes he dreamed of her, with her scrolls of hair and her eyes like Christmas baubles, just gaudy enough to be adorable, and just bright enough to be enthralling. Seven years later he still couldn’t ascertain whether her dream-selves were actual, true manifestations of the Aeris he’d known, because sometimes they made no sense – sometimes the image of her only corresponded to his own personal delusions, like that milky skin he’d never seen, or that too-large smile that belonged to someone else, grafted onto her face like some left-over, too-big feature stitched over the gap in his memory with blaring red string. He was terrified of losing her; it was terrible enough that he was forgetting her face in his conscious, waking state, so if he couldn’t even rely on his subconscious to keep her clean of all external interferences then how could he still say he was honouring her memory well enough? 

And then, after weeks and months of dreaming about nothing but dust balls and too-long female bodies stretched across his mindscape – she’d appear to him again, having shaken off all extra cotton-filled limbs and glass eyes too big for her sockets, pure as death and exhaling tenderness. She would lift her arms towards him and he’d be enveloped in that familiar scent of lilies and freshly turned earth – and he would wonder, the questions pummelling his insides that would already be turned soft as butter by her presence, is this her? Is this real? More real than the rest? (As if one dream could be “more real” than another; but the mind conducts strange experiments when it comes to belief, logic and rationality choked beneath the smoke-churning mechanics of the heart as it tries to hold on to something non-existent, recreate, reproduce, hold on, hold on at all costs - )

Sometimes, more often than not, he had those dreams where your belief of the fictitious construction only dwindles when it becomes painful; something you want to step away from, and you tell yourself, if only this weren’t real, if only I could stop this, if only this were a dream and I could stop it – well, this is a dream, isn’t it? You want the opposite of what is given, you want it so badly, and such is the strength of your desire that your reality must collapse to give way for it. And what you’re given is awakening, the light of dawn, which isn’t always much better (or in his case, the nightlight on Tifa’s side of the bed, glaring green in the darkness). He would sigh as the feeling of water streaming down his arms vanished, the feeling of her, supple and still warm against his body, leaving him as heart-achingly slowly as she had, slipping away in the blue water. And he’d be reminded that yes, he’d already mourned her, and yes, he was okay now. He was okay now. He’d turn on his side and automatically lock his body against Tifa’s, like Tetris pieces, both of them hardened with muscle and frowning while they slept. (As if the fighting was never over.) But her skin would sting him with its ruggedness, its searing heat, being so decidedly not-Aeris and he wouldn’t know what to do, frozen there with his glowing eyes like a pair of marbles lost under a bed, gleaming from where no one can see.

It was stupid to think that he was betraying her somehow, by sleeping with another woman, by being intimate with someone who wasn’t her – but what was he supposed to do? He didn’t want his relationship with Tifa to feel like what else is there, really, because that wasn’t how he felt, at least most of the time. He felt entirely justified in the daytime when he made her laugh, wine-coloured eyes swivelling to catch his, sunlight reflected in blood-red pools – when his mouth was against her long white throat, pearls tickling his nose – when she bustled around the bar with Marlene and Denzel clinging to her legs, thinking he wasn’t watching as she balanced everything without a single complaint. He knew that she was good, that she was worth it, and even that perhaps Aeris would agree – agree? But how could he know that she’d agree, how could he know that she wouldn’t be jealous? How could he know -

 _I should’ve mourned you longer,_ he’d tell himself, fist against the wall and teeth gritted, and he would feel so disrespectful, as though every blissful sigh that escaped him that wasn’t provoked by her was a gross violation, like spitting on her tomb or treading in her flowers.

Maybe he’d thought about it too often, or maybe this time she was real – in any case, she appeared to him once, on the eve of his birthday. One minute he’d had his nose in the crook between Tifa’s collarbones, both her hands cradling his head as he stared numbly at that beautifully long throat and thought of black ribbons tied in neat little knots – and the next minute, his legs were swaying back and forth through a primeval fog, out of whose depths sprouted tall black buildings and lanterns bouncing on strings. Back when Midgar was still Midgar, there had been certain streets in the slums where the broken neons took years to replace – and the years fell away behind him as he chased after the bobbing lanterns, chased after her, through this old version of Sector 5 that his mind had reconstructed for him.

(His mind – or had it been hers?)

He found her wreathed in shadows, hiding in an alleyway and smiling an impish smile. The shadows fell away from her shoulders like a cloak as he reached for her, and she slid her hands across his arms, glowing in the gritty darkness of the slums like a flower floating in foul water, unspoilt.

“Playing hide and seek in my head again?” Cloud said, and this time he definitely knew it was a dream – he was only testing her to see if she was more real than the others, as he did every time. 

“Couldn’t you tell from the décor?” She grinned at him, eyes flashing. “This is a bit more realistic than what’s in your head, I believe.”

“Ouch,” Cloud said, but he was smiling back at her. “If this is your doing, you’re being a bit too kind, don’t you think? This is too film-noir and elegantly moody for Sector 5. And you forgot the brawny idiots making their dogs shit at every sidewalk.”

 

“I can choose to remember the best of it if I want,” Aeris said with a sharp glance. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“So you choose to be kind to this place, but not to me,” Cloud replied. “Lovely.”

“Oh, don’t be such a grump. I haven’t been able to tease you in a while,” she smiled at him, then her hands wrapped around his wrists and she was pulling him along, the uneven paving stones scrolling beneath their feet. “I’m far from the saint you make me out to be. I just thought you needed some reminding.”

Her skin was translucent and glowing, like the fine membrane of a jellyfish, and the lanterns around them pulsated as though this version of Midgar were at the bottom of the sea, ghostly citizens flicking into life like so many bubbles flittering around the edges of their vision. Before long her church loomed in the ink-blue darkness, and she gazed at him as they passed it.

“I did that one justice though, didn’t I? Look at the spire – and I didn’t even fix the roof, because that would’ve been irreligious. It was your crowning moment after all – ”

“Aeris,” Cloud interrupted as she giggled, and the name felt almost forbidden as he said it, like some inappropriate thing that he never let out for fear of upsetting everyone. “Are you – is this – ”

He was frowning, and she tightened her hold on his wrist.

“How do you feel?” she asked him softly.

“Acutely,” he replied, the word coming to him in that urgent way that the right word appears to us in dreams, even if in reality it would be quite senseless. She nodded.

“And do those feelings feel real to you?” she said, and he hung his head.

“Yes.”

It slipped out of his mouth, barely pressed with any life or sound, but she heard it, perhaps because she belonged to the same incorporeal plain as words bitten back and choices left stagnating in the fear of regret.

“Then this is real, too,” she murmured. “I’m real. I’m here.”

“And so is the church,” Cloud went on with a dragging, reluctant belief, “And the streetlamps that never worked – ”

“And the hole in the roof,” Aeris responded with a smile.

Cloud looked at the way the lights spilled over the crown of her head, how her face corresponded so perfectly to his memory that he found himself reacquainted with details he’d forgotten, like the dimples in her cheeks when she smiled, or how she was always looking at him from under her brow, almost maliciously.

“What are the odds,” he found himself saying as he stroked every part of her body with his eyes, “that I fell through the exact same hole that Zack did?”

Her hands had slipped from his wrists to his own hands, and they felt heavy, like sweaty lumps over which she folded her fingers. The church fell away behind them, receding into the darkness, and he was following her with the vague fear that if she let him go he’d be swallowed into the ink of her imagination, too.

“What are the odds, indeed,” Aeris said a few minutes later, though privately, as though she were talking to herself. The sound of her voice washing over him after seven years of hearing every accent but hers, that unique blend of everything he’d already heard but this time with that perfect configuration that he could never find in anyone else’s mouth – it was making the hairs on his arms stand on end, and he watched with a tight throat as she turned to him again. Hair like a golden fount spilling from her skull – waist breaking inwards as she twisted, perfect curvature begging to be further deepened by the pull of his arms.

You can’t be real, he thought, and she couldn’t be, she never had been, had she? There had always been a fine line between hallucination and reality for him and perhaps she had been dead all along, perhaps she’d just been fucking with his head from whatever recess she hid in when she wasn’t leaning over his shoulder and smiling against his cheek, too warm, too good, too full of everything he needed.

They were in front of the Loveless, pink neons glowing with a steady throb, and Aeris stood awash in that glow with another of her smiles playing on her lips. Head tilted to the side, she said;

“I met her, before you came to buy that 1-gil flower from me. Did I ever tell you that?”

Cloud thought of Tifa’s long white legs and smudged lipstick, and did not answer.

“I liked the name of the place, so I came here from time to time,” Aeris went on. “You weren’t around when Loveless was the city’s big fad, were you?”

He was looking at her shoes rather than her face, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“I knew a man once, who could quote the entire play to you back-to-front,” she said. “Or backwards – while hopping.” Cloud’s eyes flicked up again to watch her smile widen, and it had the same effect as when Sephiroth had widened his scars into open wounds. “He always seemed so passionate when those words were in his mouth. Kind of like he didn’t really have any other purpose than to recite. But I suppose some people are like that – receptacles, or books waiting to be filled with someone else’s handwriting. They don’t care to fill themselves with their own words, their own stories, because that won’t make them feel full at all.”

She brought up a hand to the bar’s closed doors, fingertips leaving traces on the glass – proof that she still somehow had weight and substance. “He would probably have liked this place. And gotten along well with Tifa, too. I can see him right now, sharing cigarettes with her over a game of poker – ”

“I’m sorry,” he let out, almost in a groan, hands vaguely opening. She looked at him. “I’m sorry – ”

“Not that again,” she teased, but gently, her voice like cotton as she stepped into the broken circle of his arms.

“No, I mean,” Cloud started again. “I don’t blame myself any more for what happened to you.”

She snuggled against him then, her body soothingly warm. “Good.”

“But I feel – ” He tched at himself, waiting for his voice to harden before trying again. “I feel like I’m cheating you. And I don’t want to, Aeris, I don’t want to be with another woman than you, but, it’s just – ”

“How miserable would we be if we couldn’t love several people in our lifetimes?” she whispered to him, and the closeness of her voice was making him shiver again.

“I don’t love her,” he said quietly, and her arms melted against his spine, holding him together.

“I want you to love her,” she whispered back. “Love her, as hard as you can.”

He was pretending to smile though the words clunked into him, like an unexploded shell, sinking with a treacherous weight. “How do I know you’re not just a figment of my imagination, telling me everything I want to hear?”

“It’s up to you to believe what you will,” she said.

“I can’t believe anything when it comes to dreams and death.”

“You can’t know anything,” Aeris corrected him. “But you can believe what you like.”

“Aren’t you going to give me any more hints than that?”

“How can I?” the flowergirl smiled, and there was ice melting on his lips as she spoke. “How can we prove to one another, ultimately, that we exist? If you don’t believe your physical senses then all that’s left are your emotions, your desire that that other person might exist beside you. And I’m here, now, aren’t I?”

“But by your own desire, or by mine?”

“I’d be lying if I said I knew for sure,” she smiled. “Perhaps I’m nothing. Perhaps I only exist in your head – or perhaps you only exist in mine. After all, we’re the ones who keep our regrets alive.”

“You’re more to me than an object of regret.”

“Am I?”

He hadn’t noticed that he’d closed his eyes as he listened to her – her voice was a world of its own, so when he opened his eyes and saw vast plains of snow, there was almost no transition. She’d moved away from him, a gash of pink on a white canvas. Then her dress was falling slowly from her shoulders, and her skin blended with the background, as though absorbed into the monochrome.

“You know what I regret?” she said, and Cloud watched with a tight throat as the colour fell away from her body. “Never telling you that it would be alright. That you’d be alright.”

“I am alright,” Cloud whispered. “When I’m here – ”

“And outside of your head, too,” Aeris added over her shoulder, her fingers tangling in the long strands of her braid as she loosened her ribbon. “Will you promise me you’ll stop feeling guilty?”

She turned to face him, her hair falling to cover her chest and frame her nudity, inviting him to look, and his eyes glazed over as he took in that ethereal sight.

“What are you doing, Aeris?” he murmured tenderly.

“This is what you regret, isn’t it?” she replied. “You would’ve wanted to know me – entirely. As much as one person can know another.”

“So you’re manifesting my desire again?”

She smiled, then. “Perhaps I’m manifesting mine.”

The tips of their fingers were turning purple with the cold but Cloud didn’t feel it, didn’t feel anything but her, her skin and the silk of her hair enveloping his limbs as he held her in the ice. Her imagination had always had bright lights and faded edges but here the ice was clear-cut and glittering all around them, a piled-up treasure of sensations – catching their eyes and their hands with a quick delight of cold. Her lips were turning purple too as he caught them in his, their kiss dewy with melted snow and he didn’t even think to ask her where they were, didn’t think to ask her why because nothing had ever felt more appropriate, nothing had felt as right as this – he’d never really thought of ice as her element, since nothing green ever grew up here in the snowfields of the North. (Because that’s where they were - the dream-knowledge told him.) But this was her country, or at least it should’ve been, and he didn’t doubt that she could make something grow from the ice.

He clasped her body against him and almost didn’t hear when she whispered, happy birthday, Cloud, through chattering teeth and they laughed at one another, at how the cold kept them teetering on the ledge between extreme sensation and drowsiness. He had never felt so full, full of ice, full of her, and when the feeling of her hair tangled around his fingers was all that he had left he didn’t even care that he was losing all other senses as the dream collapsed – he was content.

When he woke he was still trying to untangle her hair in that slow, obsessive way of dreamers, struggling to get rid of something and not realizing it just keeps reappearing. Tifa’s nightlight glared at him and he groggily realized it was morning, though it was still dark – the dream had left him slightly cold, and smiling stupidly, so he snuggled up to Tifa as he looked for warmth.

“You awake?” she muttered sleepily, to which he grunted an affirmation. “Then happy birthday, you little shit.”

Cloud’s grin widened. “Well that was uncalled for.”

“You’ve been drooling on my side of the bed for the past hour,” she explained herself. “And I was the first to say happy birthday this time, so nobody can come after me about being the world’s worst girlfriend like last time, ok, because I fuckin’ – take _care_ of you.”

“Go back to sleep, Tifa,” Cloud laughed. “It’s fine. And, thanks.”

“Yeah,” she grunted, then after a few seconds, turned over to face him and promptly wrapped her arms around his head a little clumsily.

“I’m making pancakes,” she muttered into his hair. “How’s that.”

“Fine,” he said, nose pressed against her comfortable bosom. “Absolutely perfect.”

“You’re strangely enthusiastic. I suppose you forgot about our dearly deceased frying pan – ”

“I’m allowed to be enthusiastic on my birthday, aren’t I?” Cloud said. “Now, shut up and sleep.”

“Hn.”

…She hadn’t really been the first to say it, but the fact was that she was here, and she was definitely real – at least, according to his senses. So he supposed that she was right, in a way, and he tightened his hold on her without thinking about how her skin was rugged, and too-hot, and smelling of spices rather than flowers. He didn’t think of how bare that throat was and how calloused her hands were because it was alright – it was alright. The difference wasn’t betrayal, the difference wasn’t degradation, and even though it would take a while for his heart to stop pounding he caught himself believing that - yeah.

Maybe he’d be alright.


End file.
